At a recent talk about the Career Ladder posts, someone asked this question: Can managers pair effectively? That’s a great question. Some managers job-share. However, they don’t work simultaneously on the work. One person works for a couple of days. That person then hands off work to the other person. The handoff might work in
You want business agility. The teams have worked hard to change how they work. And you realize your current career ladder isn’t working for you—or the people you serve. The people and teams continue to experiment with agile behaviors. You would like more lateral, not just vertical options to support any person’s growth. What can
As people gain experience, they often want new and different responsibilities. In a typical career ladder (Part 1), they had one direction: up. That often creates a problem: great technical people become insufficient managers. Let’s not blame these people—many of them didn’t want to become managers However, if people want more responsibility, the career ladder
Part 1 discussed a typical career ladder. I said that when we focus on individual achievements and deliverables, we ignore the agile system of work. Worse, when we reward individual achievements we prevent an agile culture. That’s because agile teams learn together as they create the product. We need career ladders that reward working together.
As I’ve been speaking about the Modern Management Made Easy books, people ask these questions: We’re pretty good with our agile approach. It’s time for performance reviews. How do we reward someone based on individual work when we want teams to work together? What do we do? Can we extend whatever that is to our
Have you ever noticed that other people want you to do “more” work? The work has risk—if you say yes to this work, you’ll put every other deliverable at risk. What do you say? You can address this request with a simple sentence: No. That’s it. No. It’s a complete sentence. I bet you feel
We all like to think we use our value-based integrity to decide and act. And I bet you’ve seen people who don’t appear to use that kind of integrity. If you talk to them, they say they intend to do the right thing. However, they don’t always act according to their intentions. Here’s an example
When I think about agile approaches to work, I think about how fast we can change and the cost of those changes. We can change the next decisions about the work because we finish the current work and release it. Multiple deliverables allow us to change what we do and what we plan next. That’s
You’re a middle or senior manager in an organization trying to hold on in these crazy times. And you just discovered you’re shipping the wrong version of the product. (Or your product doesn’t work or it has some kind of horrible defect.) Your customers are angry. Your employees are running around, trying to fix the
I had a great time with Jeff and Squirrel on their podcast, Troubleshooting Agile. They focus on what our conversations can tell us about ourselves. We spoke about the Modern Management Made Easy books in Johanna Rothman on Modern Management Part 1. Here’s a highlight idea from the podcast: a transition to management is a